


If You See Her, Say Hello

by Cyphomandra



Category: Carrie - Stephen King
Genre: Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, PTSD, bisexual subtext, post story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-16 09:00:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13050792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cyphomandra/pseuds/Cyphomandra
Summary: Sue moves on."I don't sleep so I don't dreamSo I don't wake up frightened"The Sisters of Mercy, "On the Wire". First and Last and Always (remastered). 1985.





	If You See Her, Say Hello

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PineapplePrincess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PineapplePrincess/gifts).



> Thanks as always to my long-suffering and sleep-deprived betas, China_shop, Dashi, and Lacksley!
> 
> The title is from the Bob Dylan song of the same name. Sue's Aunt Em is reading Angela Carter's _The Bloody Chamber_.

Sometimes I dream of Carrie. She's lost, alone: looking for a friend. _I'll help you,_ I say, and I hold out my hand, but there's something already in it. Usually it's a tampon, whether the discreet twist of the o.b's that were always my preference ("You need an excuse to touch yourself?" Chris sneered once, and for the next couple of months I stashed them in my bra when I went to the bathroom rather than carry them in my hand for her to see) or the cardboard applicators, so obvious in their deliberate anonymity. Sometimes it's one of those cheap stiff sanitary pads the school kept for emergencies, like a surfboard in your underpants. A few times it's one of the small gilded pencils we put out on the tables at the prom so people could circle their chosen King and Queen on those deadly ballots. Once it was a knife.

Whatever it is, it scares Carrie. Her face changes. Her eyes hollow out, her cheeks flush red 

(blood)

and a roaring sound rises all around us. _It's all right,_ I say. _Trust me._

It's not the worst thing I could do. I've already done that.

***

My hippie aunt Em flew out from the west coast a month after the funerals and banged into my room where I was lying with my head on a pink satin throw pillow, high on two of the little blue pills from the conveniently large bottle Doc West gave me.

"Quit this godawful funk and pack a bag. You're coming with me."

I went along with her. Don't I always?

I'd never been on a plane before. We took off from Knox County Regional, stuffed in between jaded business people and an elderly couple who were telling everyone about their planned trip of a lifetime, meeting their daughter in Boston before going on with her to London. Their evident pleasure in the trip and each other had the ease of long familiarity to it.

( _It's the way I want it, Tommy._ )

I studied my boarding pass till the words blurred into meaninglessness.

The ground dropped away, and the pilot put the plane into a wide, looping three-quarter circle. I picked out a few landmarks - the coastline, the road snaking along it - then jerked my gaze away. My heart thumped against the tight cage of my ribs, and my palms were clammy.

I didn't want to look down and see Chamberlain a raw bleeding wound below me.

My aunt was reading, a book whose cover had a topless woman embracing a wolf that had arms instead of paws. I waited until she looked over.

"Could you call me Diane?" It was my middle name. "For now, anyway."

At least part of the reason for sending me away was to avoid the reporters hanging around what was left of Chamberlain, as instinctively repulsive as fat-bodied summer flies. I'd already seen my name and photo over at least three "Exclusive!" interviews I'd never given, and Sheriff Doyle had warned my father about threatening behavior with a caution that started "I'm obliged to say this, no matter how I feel," and put an officer out the front of our house for the rest of the week to warn them off. I'd had to talk to the Sheriff, but that was different; he'd been there.

"Diane." My aunt hooked a finger into her book to mark her place. "You can use my surname, if you want."

Allen. My mother's maiden name.

My parents late at night when they thought I was asleep, saying, _Do you think we should all leave?_

I nodded, my throat suddenly thick with emotion.

***

I'm watching Carrie and Tommy sit together at the dance. She looks happier than I've ever seen her, glowing and pretty; Tommy in his white dinner jacket is heart-breakingly elegant, a preview of an adult self he'll never inhabit. His parents buried him in that jacket. I think. It's hard to tell one blackened and twisted corpse from another, and there were so many. So many.

He's showing Carrie the ballot, saying something, and she laughs before clapping a hand over her mouth. I've never heard her laugh.

Tommy nudges the gondola party favor along the tablecloth with one finger, his attention diverted. Carrie folds the ballot, rips it in half; drops it on the floor. Shakes her head as Dave Bracken comes up in his usher's red blazer to collect it.

They lose the count by one vote and Tommy squeezes her hand in apology. Norma is pricked by a late-waking conscience and dashes backstage to stop Chris; Frank and Jessica kiss in victory, leaning over between their thrones, and the spotlights on them are blindingly white as the band blares out the school song…

I can't get it to go any further. Too many dead. Tommy takes Carrie home and her mother's waiting with a knife and a lifetime's worth of madness, and maybe it all happens again anyway. I let it spin back and unfold the way it was meant to.

***

Diane Allen liked San Francisco, the tight-packed buildings overflowing the surrounding hills against the blue haze of the bay, the crowds of people who were nothing like the white bread I'd grown up with. The couple in the apartment next to Aunt Em's were two men, who argued and made up again loudly while I huddled up on the fold-out bed in the living room/kitchen and tried not to hear them through the thin walls. Diane smiled at them in the mornings and asked them for help operating the temperamental washers in the basement.

I felt more comfortable as Diane, as if I had an extra layer of skin protecting me. I wrote my parents and said all the right things; I was sad, I missed them, it was hard. But I didn't feel it, not as Diane. Aunt Em worked as an actuary at Hoffmann's and got me a job in the mail room, delivering to fifty offices over ten floors; the shiny brass elevators were strictly reserved for management. I bought Diane a pair of gold hot pants with our first pay packet to show off the new legs we'd earned. Sue wouldn't have worn them.

The nights were hard. I was always Sue when I dreamed, and all my dreams were bad. When I woke up it was like falling, like something awful was pulling me down towards it, and every time it seemed a little bit longer before Diane snapped back into place and I was safe. I thought the nights were the worst thing until one morning I found blood in my underwear, and I was back in that night, standing over Carrie as she died, feeling her claw at the inside of my mind.

( _You're hiding. What are you hiding?_ )

I don't know what I did or said. Aunt Em got me out of the bathroom somehow, wrapped me in her old flannel dressing gown, called us both in sick and took me to her doctor, a gray-haired Jewish woman with bones like a bird who gave me the Pill and told me to take it everyday. ("They tell you to stop every month. But that's not biology, that's Biblical. Science says: stop and it stops — a month, two months, three, what's the difference? It'd be nine months and more if you were pregnant.") 

"Is it safe?" asked my aunt. I didn't care.

The doctor cocked her head to the side. "All drugs have risks. I'll give you the information sheet."

Doc West would only give out the Pill if you had a ring on your finger. I'd used condoms with Tommy, or rather he'd used them; he'd bought them as well, a transaction he'd recounted with embarrassed pride.

I couldn't imagine sex with anyone else.

***

Christian Youth Camp, summer of '76. I'm thirteen and my cousins have taught me how to dive in their pool when we visited at the start of summer. I change into my new yellow swimsuit and stand at the edge of the lake, conscious of others watching me. My toes flex, I suck in air, and then for one glorious moment I'm weightless. My fingers breach the cool skin of the lake and I'm underwater, eyes stinging, my body fizzing with success. I do a few slow strokes to get back to the shore.

Carrie White's hovering at the edge. She's in a horrible flower-print suit that's too big for her, one of those ones with a frill at the waist designed for fat old ladies in need of rubbery support garments. I've seen the other kids ducking her when she tries to swim. She looks miserable.

I swirl to a stop.

"I can show you what to do," I offer.

Carrie bites her lip, and I see her looking at the others in the water, laughing and jostling.

"They won't bother you if you're with me." It's true, or at least I can make it true. I'll be teased afterwards, but it's a small enough thing. I stretch out my fingers in the water, liking the way it moves and shifts against me.

Carrie makes up her mind. She sits down awkwardly and lowers herself into the lake water.

No. I didn't even think of it. I hardly spoke to her. I can't even get her to speak now.

I can't save her.

***

On Christmas Day my parents phoned to wish us well. My aunt had made us a jug of mimosas for breakfast, a fact she delighted in sharing with my mother before passing the phone over to me. Outside the apartment window the city was gray and foggy, with a pervasive damp chill; back home there was snow on the ground. A proper Christmas.

"And more on the way." My mother sounded wistful. Our family Christmas tradition was to go out for a walk first thing, and then come back inside to drink hot chocolate and open presents, still wearing our scarves and hats. I sipped my mimosa, the tang of orange bright on my tongue. We'd talked about my going home or my parents coming out but the money wasn't there. It was an easy excuse. Thinking of Chamberlain felt like drowning. 

"Ruth came by with a card for you. Ruth Grogan."

"How kind," I said automatically. I hadn't sent cards to anyone.

( _Dear Tommy, I miss you. I love you. Come back._ )

My father came on the line. He wished me well then hesitated. I felt my fingers slip on the glass and put my mimosa down on the breakfast bar.

"What is it?"

I heard him sigh. "There's no easy way to say this. There's going to be a government enquiry. A commission. Nothing formal yet, but the sheriff let us know. Augusta, probably. Next year sometime."

( _Tell them everything._ )

"I can't-" I said. For a second I nearly lost control, let all the jagged pieces spin out to land wherever, and then I pulled it back. Diane. Polite, moved but untouched.

"I can't say I'll enjoy it." I didn't bother trying to steady my voice. "But it will be good to get things over with."

Dad said something else, his voice a reassuring buzz in my ear. I picked up my mimosa and raised it to my aunt in a toast before draining it.

Diane can testify. She'll be perfect. Smooth everything over like untouched snow.

***

" _Per-_ iod!" Chris calls.

I yank the comb through my hair. "For God's sake, Chris, you think that's funny?" I send a glare round the rest of my classmates that stops their comments before they make them, and grab my spare towel. "Carrie. Here."

I think for a second she isn't going to catch it, but she does, blinking slowly at me

( _ugly **cow**_ )

like an owl. She wraps it around herself, toga-style, as I shoo the others out, telling them to send in Miss Desjardin. Chris jeers, but drifts out when the teacher bustles in.

"It's your period, Carrie," I say, kind but firm. I don't look down at the blood blooming at our feet.

She sniffs. "My what?"

"I'll explain it." I put a hand on her still damp shoulder. "Miss Desjardin?"

Abruptly, I'm with Tommy, in the back seat of his Ford, fastening my bra back into place, admiring the curve of his naked shoulders.

I'm about to confess what I did today to Carrie, but I can't. I didn't do it. I open my mouth.

"I did-" I say. 

Tommy's shoulders are now encased in his white dinner jacket. I jolt in my seat and the blue taffeta of my prom dress rustles at my sides. 

Tommy turns. "You've voted? Good." He takes the folded ballot from my unresisting fingers. "Ready for your coronation?"

There's someone already sitting on my throne. I know who it is before she looks up. She's still wearing my gym towel, and her hair hangs down in wet hanks that half cover her face.

"Carrie."

"You didn't tell me," she says, an accusation. 

I stop. "I didn't have time." In the distance, the band leader nods a signal to the musicians. "Carrie-"

"You didn't tell anyone. You're hiding." She pushes one hand up to rub the side of her head. "You tell yourself that you're trying to change things, but you're just trying to stop from being found out."

I have to get her off of that throne. "You're right." People like it when you agree with them. Somewhere out there Chris snarls in the darkness. "Let me get you another towel." I hold out my hand to her.

There's a knife in it.

She grips the chair's gilded arms. "What will you tell them?"

I haven't told anyone anything. At least, nothing that means anything. Carrie's eyes are on mine, a clear brown. The first few notes of music sound.

She's not seeing Diane. I can't look away, and then for an instant I'm back in that moment I've spent the last six months running away, from where Carrie was inside my mind. After I let her in.

It happened. It all happened.

I let the knife fall. No proxies, now. "Will you dance with me?"

Carrie slips from her seat, graceful in her home-made dress, and the bucket tips behind her. I pull her out onto the floor, our skirts flaring in the turn, and the music is so loud that you can't hear your own heartbeat.

***

When I woke up everything was the same. I got up, showered, dressed. Spat toothpaste into the sink and then looked up at my reflection in the bathroom mirror.

I thought that if you peeled away the layers - Diane, Sue, whoever - that you'd be left with nothing. But that's not true. There's me. 

"My name is Sue Snell," I say to my reflection. "I need to tell you about Carrie White."

THE END


End file.
